Notes from After Postmodernism: the Place of Theory in the Human and Social Sciences By

“Post-Modern Effects of Criminal Justice Policy: Urban Policing, Prison Privatization & 21st Century Crime Control”

A Presentation to the

Faculty Seminar on Post Modern Thought

University of North Florida

September 22, 2000

Michael A. Hallett, PhD.

University of North Florida

Introduction

In my introductory remarks last time, I flippantly said that the real reason I’m here is that I hatepost-modernism and that by virtue of the “return of social theory,” I thought that much of the spirit of liberalism had been redeemed. Given that Post Modernism seemingly has conceded that its own claimsmaking about social life is also a rather swashbuckling embodiment of discursive power-relations—not itself free from the burdens of linguistic turning and imperfect speech situations—we can now “return to social theory”—albeit in a different way.

So let me clarify my introductory statement by saying that it is not Post-Modernism I hate, as much as where I perceive that Post Modernism leaves us—in the no win situation of simultaneously being fearful to proclaim the Southeast Asian sex trade sexist and inhumane, while simultaneously using jargonistic and impenetrable speech, to pat ourselves on the back for not being colonialists. To be “frankly ethno-centric,” while being sensitive to the suffering of “others”—in the worst sense of the term “others”—is still, it seems to me, not only redemptive of the spirit of liberalism, but is indeed a shade of liberalism itself (in both the worst and the best senses.

So it is in this way that I perceive we are “After” Post Modernism—with the return of narrative—leaving us with the THREEFOLD TASK OF SOCIAL THEORY AFTER POSTMODERNISM:

to clarify the epistemic claims we make and positions we take by producing interpretations and explanations of society & culture;
to articulate the normative assumptions that are involved in this project;
to mediate between specialized scientific professions “experts” and the wider public sphere.

Its great for all of us to have an opportunity to share insights into this theme by drawing on examples of our own work. I hope to show how it is true for the discipline of criminal justice that “science, rhetoric, and politics” overlap, instead of forming clearly demarcated social spheres.

POST MODERNISM AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

It is impossible, of course, to discuss social control and post modernism without Foucault. Discipline & Punish was the first “postmodern” book I read. Foucault is deeply suspicious of the Enlightenment project of “reason” and “science,” arguing that the more pervasive “disciplines” of order, the less necessary the public use of force “punishment” becomes. The goal is not to punish but to “correct”—to gain compliance through the hidden and removed use of punishments by “experts”—rather than through the overt use of force by the state continually.

This makes punishment more palatable and, therefore, the exertion of power in social control, more acceptable. As David Garland writes (1990): “In this sense, power operates through individuals rather than against them” (138). So that for Foucault, “systems of production, of domination, and of socialization fundamentally depend upon the successful subjugation of bodies—that bodies be mastered, subjugated to training—and the object of this training is to render them docile.”

Now, for Foucault, this docility is not the direct product of the use of punishment, but rather a byproduct of disciplinary logics and technologies running rampant in society. In other words, Foucault argues that while there may be no isolated conspirators (e.g. capitalists) there is indeed a conspiracy—the inner conspiracy of knowledge-power and technology in the social control of bodies. So Foucault is pretty explicit that power is indeed exerted in punishment, but not in the traditional ways we might think. In short, it is better to “discipline” than to “punish.”

Well, I am interested in this “training” as well, and some of my work over the past few years has focused on the ways punishment is “made acceptable” to the American public, as promoted by special interests and “experts.”

OVERHEAD III: COPS—“The most punishing hour on Television”

The first example of my work I’d like to share comes from a project I titled “Backstage with COPS”—where myself and a colleague went “backstage” with the production crews filming COPS episodes in Nashville to explore the meanings of the show for officers (some of whom were our former students).

At the end of the Hacking chapter, the discussion turns to the notion of a “matrix.” Here, “constructionists” are said “to maintain that classifications are not determined by how the world is, but are convenient ways in which to represent it. …Facts are the consequences of the ways in which we represent the world” (33). He’s talking here, of course, about “benchmarks” in the hard sciences—questioning whether they are “constructed” or “real.” He proposes a synthesis, stating: “the result may be particularly strong interactions. What was known about people of a kind may become false because people of that kind have changed in virtue of what they believe about themselves. I have called this the looping effect of human kinds” (34)

As many have noted, the media play not simply a reporting role but a defining role in shaping public understanding about social issues, particularly crime and justice. As George Gerbner has famously stated: “The more television we watch, the more we believe the world to be like that portrayed on television.” 93 percent of Americans say that their number one source of information about crime and justice is “television.”

The GOAL of our project “Backstage with COPS” was twofold:

To assess the extent to which officers who appear in reality television programs such as COPS believe that the portrayal of police work on the show is an accurate or otherwise useful portrayal;

to draw on the sociological literature of Dramaturgy and Police Subculture to dig deeper to try and assess the consequencesof “reality television” for Police Subculture itself.

A couple of things are going on here:

Media production companies, like the one that produces the show COPS, are offering—up front—full editorial control of the footage that ultimately gets broadcast, to police officials themselves (talk about propaganda) because producers want that actual footage (car chases/flashing lights) and this cannot be attained without the cooperation of the police;

police are now more thoughtfully than ever before orchestrating what Peter Manning calls the “police occupational mandate” (meaning that police strategically orchestrate a presentation of self that is salient for both police subculture and the television-watching public).

This is a new frontier, we concluded, in that police departments have been traditionally resistant to the intrusion of the media into their daily operations. The police are now more strategically than ever before using the mass media to orchestrate public support for law enforcement. In short, police administrators are now allowing media personnel into the formerly-taboo backstage regions of police work (I.e. in the cruiser itself) in order to foster a public image of police work that is supportive of the police occupational mandate: “the dangerous and heroic enterprise of crook-catching and the watchful prevention of crimes” (Manning, 1997).

OVERHEAD: SURVEY FINDINGS OF COPS RESEARCH

If mass media do play an active role in the shaping of perceptions about crime—then it seems to me we have a responsibility to question, examine, and account for that portrayal. We have defined crime for the past twenty years by relying on the most visible and publicly exploitable facets of the crime problem: violence and drugs--while largely ignoring discussion of the deeper underlying causes of crime. COPS and other law-enforcement based “reality programs” offer up a sanitized version of the “official” police worldview: that not-yet-convicted suspects are to be treated as dangerous predators and that more law enforcement and punishment are the answer for the crime problem.

I think this is an example of work that contributes to at least the third of the “threefold tasks of social theory”: to mediate between specialized scientific professions—“experts”—and the wider public sphere.”

***IF POLITICS IS PERCEPTION, AND IF MOST AMERICANS REALLY DO RELY ON THE MEDIA FOR THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF THE CRIME PROBLEM, THE QUESTION I THINK THIS COPS RESEARCH RAISES ABOUT CRIMINAL JUSTICE IS: TO WHAT EXTENT DOES “REALITY” EVEN MATTER? ***

PRISON PRIVATIZATION

The next example of my work I’d like to share is a project titled: “ “Race, Crime, and the Cultural Politics of Prison Privatization,” which attempts to synthesize my experiences researching and fighting the implementation of “prison privatization” in various places around the country. I’ve been a consultant to several labor unions and state legislatures on issues related to privatization.

In my most recent prison privatization project, I’m exploring the strategic use of cultural messages about race, crime, and punishment employed by a private prison corporation seeking to secure a contract for managing an entire state prison system. The research employs a “culturalist” perspective on law “in” society to demonstrate the role cultural messages play in the social policy debate about prison privatization.In this view, the creation and operation of law occurs as much from the “bottom up” as it does from the “top down,” with legality being “co-produced” by myriad relational contingencies impacting all users of law, whatever their social or formal legal position.

Of particular interest to those taking a “culturalist” perspective are the oft-found “taken-for-granted” assumptions about law as these operate both in relation to and outside of the influence of formal legal institutions and authorities (e.g. assumptions about “early release” of convicted murderers inside a capital jury {Steiner, Bowers & Sarat 1999}; in the decision making of would-be adoptive mothers and birthmothers and their shared fear of becoming “ex-mothers” {Yngvesson, 1997}; and in the discretionary processes of agents of the criminal justice system {Ferguson & Musheno, 2000}).

In April 1997, Tennessee became the epicenter of one of the major public policy shifts of our time in criminal justice, prison privatization. That year, facing a projected $100 million budget shortfall, the Tennessee legislature gave serious consideration to the largest-ever privatization proposal on record, a contract for privatizing the entire Tennessee state prison system--with an inmate population approaching 20,000. On April 29, 1997, executives from Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) escorted key members of the legislature's Select Oversight Committee on Corrections to a private meeting at the Crown Plaza Hotel, across from the state capital in downtown Nashville. News reporters who accidentally learned of the meeting were politely asked to leave (Wade 1997b). On April 30, 1997, executives from Wackenhut Corporation arrived in Nashville to take six members of the House Ways and Means Committee out to dinner.

OVERHEAD: SUPPLY & DEMAND IN THE PRISON MARKET

The major opponent to the latest effort to privatize Tennessee’s prison system became the Tennessee State Employee’s Association (TSEA), for whom the author was a hired consultant during the initial stages of the debate and delivered a report to the legislature against privatization on their behalf (Hallett 1997). The TSEA is a state employee labor union, roughly 4,500 members of which serve as correctional officers in the state’s prisons.

We fought them to a draw on three separate occasions, until CCA finally self-destructed

OVERHEAD OF “HEADLINES”? /Original sponsor of legislation withdraws support.

Norman Rockwell to the Rescue: A Story of Power and the Strategic Use of Legality

Stinging from the legislative sponsors’ withdrawal of support for the effort to hand over control of Tennessee’s prison system to CCA, the company ran a series of eleven full-page ads in (the Gannett owned) Tennessean, the state’s largest-circulating newspaper and the state’s “paper of record,” beginning on Sunday, October 25, 1998 through Thursday, November, 19, 1998 and a series of television commercials on Nashville stations throughout the same period.

**[Insert CCA Ads/Rockwell depictions here.]**

In the above advertisements from CCA extolling the virtues of prison privatization, an African-American woman is depicted as a teacher at a chalk board, ostensibly teaching CCA inmates in a CCA classroom. This is a clear rendition of a Saturday Evening Post cover from October 27, 1917 depicting a child at a chalkboard writing “Knowledge is power” over and over, as his father discusses his performance with his teacher (see below). Clearly visible on the chalk board in the CCA ad are the terms “socialization,” “stratification,” and “family.” “Socialization” is defined as “the process by which an individual learns the customs of his or her society.” Not surprisingly, the definition of “stratification” provided on the board is not one involving capitalistic exploitation of the surplus population or laboring masses, but “the division of society into various classes based on income, education, and values.” Finally, “family” is defined as “a family…of a mother…” Conspicuously missing from this phrase are the words “and father.” Above the teacher are the words “Education,” “Counseling,” “Religion.”.

Put another way, in the midst of a profoundly damaging crisis of legitimacy, the continued over-incarceration of mostly non-violent minority offenders by a for-profit corporation is justified in traditional value-laden terms: “values,” “family,” “customs”-- asserted by an African-American, 70 percent of CCA’s inmate population. Alas, a traditional criminological argument: in order to reduce crime, the society itself is not what needs changing, it is the itinerant criminal in the custody of the well-meaning corporation needing “socialization” in order to accept the “stratified” order and be instilled with “family” values.

Indeed, as Jan Cohn notes in her history of the Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell was the key illustrator:

The Post was conceived by both (George Horace) Lorimer and (Cyrus H.) Curtis as the medium of an American consciousness. Geographically, as a national magazine, it was intended to transcend local markets dominated by newspapers. Intellectually, as a general-interest magazine printing both fiction and non-fiction on a wide variety of subjects, it was designed to reach audiences ignored by “highbrow” magazines like Harper’s and the Atlantic. Commercially, as a magazine that carried national advertising and allied itself with the newest business economics of standardization and national distribution, the Post was created to echo and reinforce in its contents the emerging concept of America as a nation unified by consumption of standardized commodities (Cohn 1989: 9).

A leading scholar in the area of prison privatization recently pointed out that Prudential Securities, in a 1997 analysis of the profit potential of the private prisons market, identified four key threats to the industry for investors: 1) falling crime; 2) shorter prison terms; 3) alternatives to incarceration; 4) changes to mandatory sentencing laws for drug crimes (see Gilbert, 2000). Of course, knowing what we know about crime--that both incarceration and victimization occur disproportionately among the poor--privatization as a solution to over-crowded and costly prisons leaves the fundamental structure of society unaddressed, and, in this case, the fountain of all profits--ever increasing populations of uneducated surplus population to be incarcerated for drug crime--conveniently intact (Irwin & Austin 1996).

Cultural and political forces struggle to create sensibilities and ways of feeling among the social groups which they address. In much the same way, the penal sensibilities of a society can be gradually heightened or else eroded by means of governmental example and political persuasion.

David Garland, Punishment and Culture: The Symbolic Dimension of Criminal Justice

The private prisons industry is one that rises and falls on a stock-in-trade of human beings, most of whom are dark skinned and poor. By drawing on the merchantile symbolism of Norman Rockwell, I believe these advertisements speak volumes about Garland’s contention that “culture”—particlularly in a capitilist system such as ours, and a for-profit operation such as private prisons—may be understood to be an important element worthy of mediation between “experts” and the “wider public sphere.”

Conclusion:

It seems to me that the real positive impact of post modernism on the humanistic and social sciences over the past twenty-five years, is an explicit reckoning of the fact that race, class, and gender differences in outcome measures (e.g. infant mortality, education, longevity, income) are not simply the byproductsof an unfair system—but that notions of race, class, sexuality, and gender are, in fact, themselves part of the mechanism of oppression as it has always operated. The “social construction of X” involves the construction of things to be taken for granted—as much as the construction of things problematic. Examination of both of these things, is our project. This still seems to me, though, to be (an important) refinement of pre-existing liberal inclinations.

References

Ferguson, Jennifer L. & Michael Musheno (2000).

“Teaching with stories: Engaging students in critical self-reflection about policing and injustice.” Journal of Criminal Justice Education. Vol 11, No. 1, pps. 149-165

Foucault, Michel (1979).

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon

Garland, David (1990).

Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gilbert, Michael (2000)

"How much privatization is too much privatization of criminal justice services?" In: Privatization of Criminal Justice: Past, Present, and Future. David Shichor and Michael Gilbert, Editors. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing

Hallett, Michael A. & J. Frank Lee (2000).

“Public Money, Private Interests: The Grassroots Movement Against CCA in Tennessee.” In: Privatization in Criminal Justice: Past, Present, and Future. David Shicor & Michael J. Gilbert, Eds. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co. pps. 227 – 244.

Hallett, Michael A. (1997).

Report to the Tennessee Legislature/Select Oversight Committee on Corrections: Statement on the Proposal to Privatize Tennessee Prisons. Nashville, TN: Tennessee State Employees Association. Authored report, assisted in development of counter-strategy to proposal, testified at public hearing. Tennessee State Employees Association. May 1997 Testimony before Tennessee State Legislature/Select Oversight Committee on Corrections "Statement on the Proposal to Privatize Tennessee Prisons." May 15, 1997. Tennessee State Employees Association